Nightsiders (9 page)

His face seemed to grow, to enlarge and
inflate
, and the light dimmed and flickered around him.

“We are exactly who you don’t want to be, who you’re glad you’re not. We’re the ones who remind you to be good and careful, to do your jobs and pay your taxes and not get bitten on the arse. We’re the flipside, the underside, the
nightside
. We’re the damned, the damned, the damned…and we’re never going away. We are them; we are
They
.” His theatrical speech sounded rehearsed, scripted.

When Corbeau stopped speaking, a silence seemed to fill the room, straining the joints in the construction. Robert expected timbers to creak and crack, windows to shatter, bricks to explode under the unbearable pressure of all that ghastly silence. But it did not happen. Instead, Monica Corbeau once more began to giggle.

Nathan Corbeau took the final few steps toward Robert, stopping only when he was right in his face. The man’s breath smelled like dog shit. Robert winced, but stood firm. It was all he could do; put on a show of strength.

“Remember this?” Corbeau slowly raised his hand, and Robert saw he was holding a mobile phone. He twisted his wrist, showing Robert the screen, and the picture upon it. He must have taken the shot from the car last night, outside the bar. It showed Monica on her knees from the side, with her face buried in Robert’s crotch. Her eyes were closed, her cheek bulged, and Robert’s hands were gripping the sides of her head. “She has a good technique, learned from working on her back in backrooms and bedsits, when we were too poor to put food in the babies’ mouths.” Corbeau pressed a button and the still picture began to move. It was not a photograph; it was a film clip.

Robert tore his eyes from the little screen and stared at Corbeau.

“I suppose your wife still has the same number?” Corbeau raised the phone into the air, as if in a form of victory salute, and made a big show of pressing another one of the buttons. “And there it goes, right to her handset. The wonders of technology, eh?”

Realization dawned upon Robert, and the earth trembled beneath him. “No. You haven’t…”

Corbeau nodded. “Oh yes I have.”

What should he do, where could he go? There was no point in running, because the file would already have arrived, and by the time he reached her Sarah would have seen it. This was irreversible; there was nothing he could do to prevent the outcome, or to rewind the tape of the last few minutes. All he could do was hope her capacity for mercy had not left her after the attack, and that he had done enough in all their years of marriage for her to realize how much he loved her, how much she meant to him, despite his many flaws.

“One more thing.” Corbeau, still smiling, turned to face the door that led to the kitchen. “You can bring her out now.”

Robert was frozen. He was a man of ice. What now, what next?

Molly walked through the door, her face dirty with tears. She was sniffling, but quietly, as if she had been ordered to remain silent. Her feet scuffed the carpet and her hands played with the hem of her sweater. She looked small, tiny; a mere baby in a room filled with adults.

There was a boy standing behind her. He looked to be about sixteen or seventeen. On his head was a Burberry baseball cap and he was wearing an ugly tracksuit. Fine stubble shone at his chin, but his cheeks were hairless and marked with old acne scars. Robert was sure this was the boy he had seen Molly with before—the boy she had been secretly spending time with.

“Meet my son, Ethan. He’s a good boy, but does play a bit rough.” Corbeau took a step back, as if expecting Robert to leap at him, fists swinging.

Robert, beyond even the thought of violence now, stared at his daughter. “Molly. Are you okay?”

She nodded, but did not speak. She was frightened and ashamed. Now her father knew the depth and breadth of her lie, and the sheer magnitude of this betrayal had taken away her voice, rendering her mute.

“What do you want to do?” Corbeau’s voice had once again lowered and taken on an almost sensual tone. “Do you want to kill him, or do you want to kill me? You want to kill someone, I know you do. I can smell it on you, like the scent on a dog. You want to spill blood, but you don’t know how. Your safe and secure upbringing has kept you in a bubble, kept you away from having to take a life. Now’s the time to look back, reach inside, and become primal…but you don’t have a clue where to start.”

On the sofa, Monica Corbeau began to sing. It was a sad song, a lament or a hymn in a foreign tongue, and it sounded incongruous here, in this room, at this moment.

Ethan Corbeau pushed Molly away from him, toward Robert. The boy, he could now see, was holding a knife. He had been pressing the blade into Molly’s back, against her spine.

“Go on,” said Nathan Corbeau. “Kill him. Give it a try.”

Robert wanted to strike. Oh, how he wanted to strike: he could feel bone shattering against his knuckles, taste blood on his lips, could even hear the sound of screams in the air. But he knew he was outnumbered, and that if he even tried to make a move for either the man or the boy, he would be killed. The game would be over.

“No.” He shook his head and reached out for Molly. She ran into his arms, finally able to sob. He felt the heat of her terror against his chest, the dampness of her tears on his skin.

Two more children, these ones a lot younger than Ethan, stepped out from behind their brother. The boy was small, underfed; his skinny arms and legs were white as paper. The girl was even smaller, and had wispy white-blonde hair. They did not look alike; their features held no similarities whatsoever. Robert realized this was, at best, a makeshift family, and he wondered where these children had been taken from. Did they have real parents somewhere, weeping for the loss of their young ones?

“My family,” said Corbeau, making an expansive gesture with his arms. “My clan. All together, at last.”

Robert began to back away, slowly, carefully, not making any sudden movements. It felt like he was facing down a rabid dog, lulling it into believing he was not afraid and that he was not going anywhere…but all the time waiting for the right moment to bolt.

“Don’t worry,” said Corbeau, shattering the illusion. “You’re free to go. This time. But the next time we meet…this all ends. It ends in tears. It’s been fun, and it still is, but all fun must come to an end.” He bared his teeth, hissing like a vampire from an old film, and his eyes were black as coal. Not for the first time, Robert wondered if the man was even human.

But no; there were no easy answers here, no quick and simplistic solutions. There was no monster in the home or ghost in the machine. This was a man—a ruined, broken man—and the damage he could do was real and deadly. No crucifix would send him away; no wooden stake or silver bullet could be employed to stop his heart. He was flesh and blood, yet of a different breed entirely. Robert’s notion of a rabid dog was closer to the truth than that of a supernatural entity. Nathan Corbeau was feral, ferocious; he was an animal…but an entirely human animal.

Robert backed out of the room and along the hallway, clinging desperately to Molly, not wanting to ever let her go again. He reached behind him and unlatched the front door, only turning his back on the Corbeaus once he was in the little porch. He walked quickly, but he did not run. Molly clung to him, her fingers digging into his clothing, and into the skin beneath.

Even when he reached the car he could hear laughter coming from the house, and only when he drove away did he allow himself to cry.

2:30
P.M.

“Burt, it’s me. It’s Robert.” He had pulled the car off the road and into a dirt shoulder. Molly was asleep on the backseat; her misadventure had taken its toll, and she barely had time to reassure him she had not been physically harmed during the ordeal before her eyelids had begun to flicker closed.

“I was planning on speaking to you. I have something to tell you.” Morrow’s voice was unreadable. He was giving nothing away.

“What have you found out? We’re desperate here. Things have taken a weird turn, and I’m beginning to doubt everyone…and every damn thing. Tell me I’m not going mad.” Robert’s cheeks were still damp from the tears, but all his crying was now done. He was finally ready to fight back.

“In all my years in law I have never encountered anything like this. It’s beyond belief.” Morrow paused, as if preparing himself. “I’ve done some research on this Corbeau character, and it seems he doesn’t even exist.”

Birds sang outside the car. A rabbit ran across the road in front of the bonnet, stopping to stare for a moment before moving on. An airplane contrail formed a hazy arc in the sky above the windshield.

“Oh, all the paperwork is in place: there’s a driver’s license, a birth certificate, a national insurance number—the
illusion
of an identity. But when I looked deeper, digging under the official layer, there’s no further proof of the man or his family. It’s like someone has set up these identities, but for a reason I cannot possibly even guess at. He’s been involved in no criminal activity, doesn’t even flag up on the constabulary’s HOLMES system as having any kind of criminal record. There’s nothing…and that’s what first made me suspicious.”

“What do you mean?” Robert’s mind was working overtime. This was too much, too little…too
something
.

“People always make ripples on the pond, Robert, it’s impossible not to, especially these days. We have CCTV on every street corner; your name is on so many official lists it would make your head spin…there’s no way anyone can go unnoticed. But somehow, and for some reason, that’s exactly what this Corbeau has done. He has never had a parking ticket or a police caution. He has appeared on no surveillance camera in the UK. There’s nothing. Nothing. And that’s impossible.”

Once again Robert felt himself slipping away. Why would a man with no real identity steal his? It did not make sense, not on any level. There was nothing to be gained from his actions…nothing but…entertainment. He did not even want to think about the possibly fictional Sergeant McMahon, and whatever his elusive presence represented. “Did you know,” he said into the phone, “
corbeau
is the French word for
crow
?” He stared out of the windshield, up into the treetops. Birds’ nests were clustered there like scabs.

“Robert? Are you okay, Robert?”

He brought his attention back to the phone. “And crows feed on carrion, don’t they? They eat dead and abandoned flesh.”

“Come on, Robert. Snap out of it…we can solve this, I promise you. I just need some time.”

Robert smiled. He realized for the first time that part of him was actually envious of Corbeau; he was jealous of the freedom the man possessed, of the way he could simply uproot and build a new family whenever he needed, or perhaps not bother and drift alone for a while, until he once again felt the urge to piece together a clan. “There’s no time left, Burt. But thank you. Thanks for all you’ve done for us.” He ended the call and threw the phone into the footwell, then turned to look at his sleeping daughter. She was curled up like an infant, sucking her thumb. Briefly, he wondered what his life might have been like if she and her brother had never been born.

Then he looked forward and started the car, pulling out again into the narrow road. There was no traffic, so he should be back at the hotel in Battle within half an hour. Molly would probably not even wake during the journey, and the rest would do her some good. There was a long night ahead, and the demands upon her young body and mind might be immense. It was good she get some rest now, while she was able.

The image of Nathan Corbeau loomed large in Robert’s mind, and behind him stood the shadowy figure of Sergeant McMahon. Corbeau was a man—he had to be—but if that was the case, then what exactly was McMahon? He had acted odd from the start, the way one might
expect
a small-town policeman to act rather than how a real one would behave. It had taken a while for Robert to consciously register this, but it had niggled away at the back of his mind, taking small bites, shading things, from the very start.

But if the sergeant had never really existed, how could they have even met him? He had even taken them into the station and interviewed Robert in his boss’s office. He tried to remember exactly how things had happened. Sarah and the kids had certainly spoken with him, and Corbeau had used the sergeant’s name. He could not be a figment of Robert’s imagination because others had interacted with him…but that did not mean he wasn’t a figment of
Corbeau’s
diseased mind; a figment that had walked out into the world, moving among them to push along the sequence of events.

The idea shocked him in a way he could not pin down. He had earlier thought of McMahon as a fictional presence and himself as a reluctant protagonist in some mysterious plot. What, then, if that were true? What if this entire situation was a fiction, and they were all merely players? It was like that Shakespeare quote, the one about all life being a stage…

Robert tried to examine his life before they had arrived in Battle, but everything seemed shrouded in mist. Shapes loomed and retreated; events were partially glimpsed. Even the attack on Sarah felt like a story someone had once told him. He knew it had happened—he remembered it—but he felt no real connection to the event other than a sense of muted rage.